The importance of a book, be it fictional, factual or scientific, can be
judged in my opinion by the new perspectives it opens to the reader and the
insights it offers into one’s socially conditioned experience. An eye-opening
book must function as a lens that enables the reader to view our complex
contemporary human condition from another, previously undisclosed angle, shedding
light on the workings of the globalized world we now live in. Thus, reaching for
new dimensions, a well-researched and innovative book offers cognitive and emotional
tools for understanding the surrounding world and the positions we take and how
these can be transformed. The impact of such books, of course, always depends
heavily on the extent of the reader’s motivation and the book’s persuasiveness.
Lilijana Burcar’s A New Wave of Innocence in Children’s Literature
convincingly fulfils all of these criteria.

In her detailed and subtle discourse analyses of two best-selling series, J.K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,
Burcar employs feminist theories and poststructural theorems, introducing into
the scientific discourse on childhood a necessary and much often overlooked
perspective. The approach also stands for a novelty in the Slovenian context,
where some attempts at gender criticism have been made, but none of them on such
a large and consistent scale. The author first provides an overview of the
various types of childhood imaginaries and child icons that have been shaped and
defined by different socio-political contexts in the recent history of Western
thought. Two types of children are foregrounded: the Romantic innocent child and
the knowing child. Positioned as a child of nature, an innocent child is also
perceived as existing out of time and place. It functions as an emptied sign and
as a projection screen of adults’ social desires and fears. Still, the child is
understood to be a holistic being, nature-bound and ruled by instinct. Society
can either discard it or acknowledge it as a savior. The knowing child is socially
embedded and active. It is not a blank slate but a subject caught in the processes
of becoming, for just like the adult, a child too is enmeshed in discourses of
class, gender and race. The innocent child, on the other hand, is objectified and
lacks subjectivity.

By introducing a gender perspective in the second chapter, Burcar provides an
insight into the interdependence of literary production for the young and socio-economic
changes. The gender patterns associated with the rise of genres that addressed
boys through adventure books and girls through household tales, have not been
entirely undone. As the author argues, contemporary best-sellers for children
such as Rowling’s and Pullman’s series, have reintroduced and naturalized gender
binaries alongside the revival of the innocent-child paradigm. The massive
comeback of the latter stands in stark contrast to the numerous attempts at
complex presentations of differentiated childhood found in alternative fiction
and the literary production that marked the last quarter of the twentieth century.

On the basis of performative theories of gender Burcar foregrounds how
problematic the reductions to monolithic gender identities of femininity and
masculinity are and exposes their conservative ideology. In both oeuvres, of
course in different ways and to a different extent, a neoconservative return to
fixed gender categories can be discerned, which inevitably results in the denial
of subjectivity, independence and a new “domestication” of the girl-child. This
thesis is of special interest as literary critics often praise the seeming
progressiveness of Rowling’s and Pullman’s female figures, the equality in
gender-representation, the richness of ideas, and so forth. And – honestly speaking
– even as adult readers we let ourselves be seduced by the authors’ strategies,
fostering uncritical, superficial, consumer-like reading. Lilijana Burcar’s book
draws in our gaze, displaces our perspective and focuses our attention on the
subtext, that is, to the texts’ inherent ideology.

The third chapter concentrates on the fictional world of the two oeuvres and
deconstructs their discourses. Convincingly and in great detail the author examines
from different angles how Rowling constructs the boy-figure as an autonomous,
self-contained personality, a hero and savior, and how the female figures are
disqualified, their personalities reduced and broken. Harry stands out as the
“innocent child,” while the “knowing child” Hermione is consistently marginalized.
This kind of gendering reaffirms the patriarchal order through the imagery of the
innocent child and thus helps to reinstate a conservative social structure. A
precise reading of His Dark Materials leads to similar results for the
girl-child. Although, as Burcar claims, the trilogy opens with a highly complex
exploration of childhood where children are not blank slates but dynamic and
socially conditioned subjects, upon the introduction of the boy protagonist the
complexity shifts to the boy’s side and the girl is reconfigured by losing her
independence and shrewdness and all the characteristics that pertain to a knowing
child. She is instead turned into a particular version of a helpless and innocent,
merely intuitive child – an obediently silent and submissive figure, dependent
on the thinking and actions of the rational boy protagonist. In both series the
universal figure of childhood is a boy protagonist while girls are symbolically
included only to be marginalized.

As Burcar emphasizes from the very start, the return of the romantic icon of
the innocent child is directly tied to the reaffirming of conservative gender
politics and the literary socialization of young readers that goes with it. Under
the cover of a newly awakened discourse of innocence and a seemingly apolitical
discourse of the child, a hidden voyeuristic sexualization of children, childhood
and adolescence can be detected in literature for the young. It is especially
disconcerting that in a world that recognizes the importance and the vital impact
of female work and public participation, girl readers are cunningly socialized
to accept supportive roles, to be disempowered as readers and are seduced to
accept a second-rate or even marginal positioning as natural.